Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 21, 2020)

Disregard the calendar. For the next few minutes, it’s October 21.

Two weeks into the second Nagorno-Karabakh War – For some reason, I’m reminded of the repeated wars in the Balkans immediately prior to the Great War.
Beretta Defense Systems gets the nod to manufacture the next-gen squad weapon – Go pasta gun guys!
Remember how H und K lost that G36 replacement contract? They aren’t taking it sitting down – HK alleges that CG Haenel infringed patents, and the Germans cancelled the contract after the news dropped.
Growler drivers get their own Top Gun school, except for EW – Don’t get caught nearby with a software-defined radio stick.
BAE offers the Archer wheeled howitzer for Big Army’s next gun system
Fun with loitering munitions – For a value of ‘fun’ that supposes you’re on the right side of them.
Brazil’s F-5s are undoubtedly the most capable Tigers on the planet
Zumwalt fires a missile for… the first time? Really? It took this long?
Prince of Wales springs a leak – A bad’un, flooding an engine compartment to a depth of at least a meter.
Japan to build lithium-ion-powered Soryus – The Drive notes that thermal runaway in a submarine battery pack is a Very Bad Thing.
Patriot battery deploys to regional Texas airport – Evidently, it’s an exercise to train the skills needed to deploy on short notice to new places.
Did an RC-135W fly over Taiwan? USAF plays coy – I’m all for supporting Best China.

Cigarettes don’t burn in submarines – You’d expect that either parvusimperator or I would have known this already, but we did not.
Another Starlink launch – The fact that SpaceX can launch and recover rockets and is rapidly outpacing the rest of humanity in number of satellites operated isn’t really news anymore, but this one has some really cool photos of a landed booster returning to port.
Phonics is hot again – Good. Reading instruction has long been the subject of educational cargo cultism: “The smart kids don’t sound out every word, they recognize words, so we’ll teach all the kids that way!” Without realizing, of course, that the reason the smart kids can recognize words is because they put in the time sounding out words to the point where they got burned in.
The sun emits gamma rays in inexplicably large quantities – I was going to see if there was a Quanta article on this, before I realized it was a Quanta article.
Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene – It’s the ArXiv preprint of the paper about harvesting energy from graphene. I should have checked if there’s a Quanta article about this.
There isn’t, but here’s one about the room temperature superconductor – Cheating a bit; it is decidedly not room-pressure.

Tallboy earthquake bomb blows up during defusing attempt – Surprisingly, nobody was hurt, including the divers.
Also, you can watch it blow up – Cooool. Also, a reminder that e.g. DCS gets its bomb hits wrong, in that the visible disturbance lasts a long time. I recall reading something from a Viper pilot in the Bosnian intervention about how a 500lb bomb made a great marker, because the dust column lingered for a useful amount of time.
In 1978, some think tank (probably) suggested a 500,000-ton ‘ultracarrier’ – A cool 26 knots on 400,000 horsepower.
Reagan to Thatcher: “Hey, want in on this cool stealth bomber thing? – The British said ‘no’. We almost got an F-117B out of it, though.

Why does owning a gun make a judge’s Second Amendment rulings suspect? – Because a large cohort of Americans thinks the right to keep and bear arms is a second-class right. Imagine the same question asked about speech: “Judge Fishbreath has a blog. How can we be sure he’ll rule fairly on speech cases?”
20 minutes of Ruger revolver disassembly to put you to sleep – It was actually extremely helpful for me.

Obligatory share of the NY Post’s Biden bombshell – There has been sufficient FUD spread about this story that I no longer feel entirely certain of its meanings or implications, but it’s in the news, at least.
November 3rd is going to last approximately eleven years – PA and Wisconsin both only start to count mail-in and absentee ballots on election day.
JD Vance on government of, by, and for the elite – Which, granted, I’m a member of, at least by most ways you’d care to measure.
Everyone, including Trump, misunderstands Trump voters

Why do zebras have stripes? – The answer is not, as I would have confidently told you one week ago, camouflage. It’s insect resistance: flies find it hard to land on a striped surface, and Africa is full of little flying things carrying equinocidal diseases.
Door Kickers 2 is still on the way – Door Kickers the First comes with the Genuine Patent Soapbox Seal of Editorial Approval. We’re split 50-50 between hopeful and cynical on the next entry.
Red Bull could quit Formula One – They’re pitching a fit because Mercedes can’t sell them engines (no factory capacity left), they burned their bridges with Renault during the 2018 split, and even Ferrari doesn’t want Ferrari engines right now.
Surprising nobody, Wikipedia has a leftist bias – Just wait until I tell you about universities and the press!

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